👨‍✈️ The new era of AI copilots

AI-HOI AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter - with a few news, tips and hacks. Here's what we have in store for you today:

• 👨‍✈️ The new era of AI copilots

• ⚔️ The search engine war enters the next round

• 🖼️ This "funny" addition makes your AI images more authentic

Let's go!

👨‍✈️ The new era of AI copilots

You may have noticed that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is once again on an AI tour. And as always, he had some exciting innovations in his luggage. Check out his keynote:

Main topic: The era of AI copilots is in full swing

Microsoft has shaped our lives as office workers and now wants to unlock the next level with AI copilots. They shall be our very own personal AI employees who help us think and work more efficient.

According to Nadella, copilots are the new interface with which we communicate with (AI) machines. We totally agree with this: working together with the machine via language is the most obvious form of interaction.

At the moment, however, it doesn't look like there will be the one single omnipresent copilot from Microsoft/Apple/OpenAI to rule them all - meaning a bot that does everything for and with us. Instead, there are many different context-specific helpers.

Specialized copilots become the most important tools

To make copilots really useful, you need specialized versions of them, depending on the type of task you are trying to accomplish. The AI helpers should not only provide answers, but ideally also be able to use certain tools, etc.

If you have ever tried Microsoft Copilot, you will have noticed that it is still not that useful for many everyday tasks. The real added value therefore comes from specifically built and trained Copilots, which are available in various applications.

Let's take the Breeze Copilot from HubSpot as an example.

If you work with a tool like HubSpot for sales, marketing and customer service, then general copilots like the one from Microsoft are not really useful as of now. They lack the access and context to implement something in the tools. And Anthropic's Computer Use feature is not yet ready for this either.

But HubSpot's Breeze Copilot is such a specific copilot that supports you in all your work in HubSpot. You can simply open it up anywhere in the tool in the sidebar, and it can support you in almost all activities.

For example, how about researching a specific company that you want to add to your sales pipeline?

The Breeze Copilot not only researches the information but can also create the contact in HubSpot.

Or do you need some help brainstorming new blog article ideas? No problem, the content will be created and published directly, including headline and image.

Final example: the Breeze Copilot can also prepare you for meetings by pulling all relevant information from messages and your CRM!

These were a few examples that clearly show that specific copilots can currently help you much better than generic ones. As always, HubSpot is at the forefront, and you can find further information here:

Conclusion: use Copilots and learn to work with AI

Of course, we are always trying to make clever use of the possibilities of AI in our daily business. And the more we experiment with Copilots of all kinds, the more enthusiastic we become. Not all that glitters is gold yet - but the direction is clear, and the tools are getting better and better.

In the near future, there probably won't be one perfect copilot tool, but rather context-specific copilots, specialized for specific apps and use cases. When choosing new software, you should definitely check whether the providers already have plans to integrate their own copilots. They will be a great help in any case!

⚔️ The search engine war enters the next round

News emerged this week that Meta (Facebook, Insta & Co.) is building its own search engine.

The aim is to become more independent of Microsoft and Google. And OpenAI also just announced SearchGPT, you can use it as of now!

And then there is the AI search top dog Perplexity, which we have loved for a very long time. The exciting thing here is that the new competition for Google not only enables web search, but completely changes the entire search experience.

You have been able to perform a web search with the "/search" prompt in ChatGPT for a long time. But the new ChatGPT Search is a completely new user experience with many more options - it can even replace your default browser search engine!

What makes the new search engines so good?

The efforts of ChatGPT’s Search, Perplexity and Meta are an attack on Google's business model.

It's all great for us users because there's a lot of innovation happening in a short amount of time. Google always finds it difficult to change things because so many billions in advertising budgets are tied to the existing system.

And the new players are a bit more agile. That's one reason why we love Perplexity so much:

When you search via Perplexity, a semantic search takes place on the web - but the tool provides you with the answer to your question very clearly and quickly. And you can then conveniently continue chatting with the results.

Perplexity is already our favorite tool when it comes to research - and with the great new Perplexity Spaces feature, it's about to get even better.

These are small trainable bots, similar to the GPTs at ChatGPT. You can give them specific instructions on what you want to do with them. And you can even upload your own documents here! This allows you to talk to a trained chatbot that searches for and evaluates information from the Internet and also incorporates your documents.

The whole thing is incredibly powerful - give it a try!

🖼️ This "funny" addition makes your AI images more authentic

And last but not least, something to try out!

If you've been reading us for a while, you'll know that we're big fans of the image AI FLUX from Black Forest Labs.

One problem with the ever-improving image models is that the images look almost unrealistically professional.

But there is now a small prompt hack that leads to very authentic images. Specifically, it is a string that you put in front of your prompt:

IMG_2948.CR2

If you're a photographer, you may be familiar with this (we're not), because that's often the name of the raw images from Canon cameras.

The idea behind this is that the AI has been trained on many such images that have not been edited and polished. It doesn't really matter whether this is true or not. Prompts don't have to make sense; they just have to work.

With this label in front of your prompts, you should usually get very authentic, not too professional looking pictures. Just as if they could be real photos. Here's a video call to celebrate Halloween:

The prompt:

IMG_2948.CR2: a screenshot of a Teams call with a 2x2 grid of participants, they are all dressed up for Halloween, great make up

Give it a try!

We'll be back on the weekend with all the news about Apple Intelligence and the other updates that happened this week.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

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